The Front Runner

long as he's not a minor. I just don't want trouble with the law. Otherwise it's not my business, or the school's business, or society's business what you do. And frankly, nobody on campus would pay attention. It's a live and let live place, which is what I wanted."
    By now I was so scarred and cautious that I could scarcely believe the incredible Christian kindness of this offer.
    "I'm hard on kids," I said. "I'm not one of your mealy-mouthed permissive liberals." (This from a man who was having some second thoughts about conservatism.)
    Joe looked reflective. "I've talked to some men who were on your team at Penn State. One of them expressed their sentiments pretty well. He said, 'Harlan Brown was a mean son of a bitch, but the runners that failed him went away knowing that they had failed personally. They were unable to blame it on his harshness.' "
    He swallowed the rest of his scotch. "A four-year contract, Harlan. Twenty thousand to start with. Board and keep on campus, so you'll be spared living expenses. Think about it. Let me know sometime during the next week."
    I swallowed the rest of my milk. "I don't have to think about it," I said. "I'll take it."
    At Prescott, I found—for the first time since my childhood—a home. Joe's wife Marian was as kind as he was. Both of them taught me the real meaning of liberalism—a tough-minded and virile liberalism. The two of them were patient with me during the first few months as I licked my wounds and healed myself.
    Prescott was even structured like a family. It was, if you must, a kind of a commune, and it worked. Faculty and students lived mixed together, with no visible difference in status. The students ran the campus, worked in the administration and even shoveled snow. Joe was almost never to be found in his walnut-paneled office in the main building (which had once been his house), unless he actually had some work to do there. He was
    Usually out on the campus with his clipboard, thinking, listening, talking. Or he was traveling to get new ideas and new people.
    No attempt was made to regulate anybody's morals at Prescott. Students and faculty were free to set up their own living arrangements. The dorms were coed. I found a few other gays already on campus. There was a tiny gay-lib student group, about four or five, 'and there were the two male faculty members he'd mentioned, who were living together. Since both the faculty and the student body were already so full of colorful heterosexual eccentrics, nobody paid much attention to them.
    Prescott was not a fancy place. The buildings were strictly functional, and the equipment was simply what was needed. Joe wanted something that really worked, not a glittering showcase full of problems and high overhead. As a result, it was one of the few private schools in the U.S. that wasn't having money problems, and whose enrollment was growing. When I came there, the school had 1,500 students, about the size of Oberlin.
    The reason that an ex-Marine officer could feel so comfortable at Prescott was that a lot of my ideas had changed. My hardshell conservatism had suffered a death blow. I was no longer able to judge people, or myself, by the same standards as before. I was still deeply patriotic, and loved the flag, and believed in America's mission. But my patriotism was now tinged by deep anxiety over the human flaws in my country, and I began to think that these flaws should be polished away.
    I was more lenient with my athletes now.
    I still expected as much hard work and responsibility from them as before. But I stopped hassling them about their hair. It occurred to me that fights about hair were a big waste of time and energy. The kids ran with their legs, not their hair.
    I stopped hassling them about chastity. I had learned the hard way that when an athlete bottles-up sexual energy, it can create destructive tensions. Sex is nature's sleeping pill. If I had a kid who got jumpy the night before a meet, I'd prescribe a hot bath, some-
    thing warm to drink and a tender half hour with his girlfriend, and he'd sleep like a baby.
    I even relaxed a little on the issue of drinking. How can you tell a kid not to have a beer when he sees so many world-class athletes having a beer? "Frank Shorter had a beer the night before he won the marathon at Munich," they'd tell me. How can you argue? And beer replaces the salts after a long hard run, too.
    There were a number of things that I stayed uptight about, because I knew